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It’s Illustration Friday!

Please enjoy the wonderful illustration above by Rachel Quinlan, our Pick of the Week for last week’s topic of WET. Thanks to everyone who participated with drawings, paintings, sculptures, and more. We love seeing it all!

You can see a gallery of ALL the entries here.

And of course, you can now participate in this week’s topic:

UNICORN

Here’s how:

Step 1: Illustrate your interpretation of the current week’s topic (always viewable on the homepage).

Step 2: Post your image onto your blog / flickr / facebook, etc.

Step 3: Come back to Illustration Friday and submit your illustration (see big “Submit your illustration” button on the homepage).

Step 4: Your illustration will then be added to the public Gallery where it will be viewable along with everyone else’s from the IF community!

Also be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to our weekly email newsletter to keep up with our exciting community updates!

HAPPY ILLUSTRATING!

Well, it took me only a week to fail on my promise to get a new sketch up every friday.

Yep, I kinda suck.

Maybe this will make you feel a bit better.

I've recently decided to do something I've always wanted to do, but for whatever reason always backed out of - a webcomic.

I've loved comics as a medium since I was a kid and I've always thought doing a webcomic on a regular basis might be fun. That being said, I don't have a ton of extra time and I didn't want to get something started and never see it through.

I'm not saying there's no chance of that happening this time out, but I've chosen sort of an easy-breezy style of art and I'm going to give it my best.

I want to get a few pages ahead of the game before I start posting stuff, so I'm looking at getting up and running by the end of next month - hopefully. I'll have mo information as I get closer.

In the meantime, here's a little something to wet your whistle.

Steve

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, will be published by Perigee in July. In the post below Ammon, an expert dictionary reader, reflects on rain.

My girlfriend Alix and I are driving across the country, as people are occasionally wont to do. I know that this particularly American rite of passage is not uncommon but it is one that I have never completed. And so even though we are not in fact driving all the way across I am nonetheless quite excited.

The weather is quite excited as well, and it chooses to make apparent this excitement by raining almost continuously as we’ve driven south and west. I love the rain, and mind its on and off-again exuberance not at all. Each fresh storm that we drive into reminds me of just how sodden English is with its own words for rain.

There are small clutches of largely archaic Scottish words that can describe a different kind of rain, and can be so much more specific than simply relying on drizzle/rain/downpour. There are words such as blirts (’a short dash of rain coming with a gust of wind’), bracks (’a sudden heavy fall of rain’), and driffle (’to rain fitfully…as at the “tail” of a shower’).

There are words for things that have been wet with rain (impluvious), and words that can describe the drip of your clothes when you’ve gotten soaked (platch).

Driving down the highway there is evidence of the rain everywhere, even in those few intervals between showers (also know as hot gleams). The clouds ahead that are dark and ponderous are imbriferous (rain-bringing) and the cars that approach on the other side of the highway and have just passed out of a storm of their own are bedrabbled (made wet or dirty with rain and mud).

There are rain words whose main function is not to describe something, but rather to arouse a vocabularian sense of whimsy, such as hyetal (of or belonging to rain).

I am sure that has hyetal many fine technical uses, but whenever I think of it I simply wonder what sort of things belong to the rain and if the rain ever gets tired of owning them.

My favorite world for rain is the one that comes to mind when we take advantage of a pluvial lull, and stop driving. When we get out of the car the smell of freshly fallen rain rising off the sidewalk and the word that describes this smell inextricably link themselves in my brain–petrichor–and I cannot tell if the word makes me like the smell or the smell makes me like the word or if it matters at all.

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I'm chagrined to admit how late I was to the party with Robert's Snow: For Cancer's Cure. For those who don't know, it's a charitable event founded by children's author and illustrator Grace Lin in honor of her now late husband Robert. Basically, a bunch of children's book illustrators donate their artistic services to decorate a snowflake. The snowflakes are then auctioned off, with all proceeds benefitting the Jimmy Fund for sarcoma research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

I'd heard of the event, but didn't properly check it out until the last day of the auction. (I credit Fuse 8's clever marketing campaign for getting me off my virtual tuchis.) Anyway, better late than never, right? I managed to drive up the price on some snowflakes with my bids, and actually placed the winning bid on the adorable snowflake painted by Randy Cecil (click image at left for the close-up). I have but two regrets: that I didn't jump into the bidding earlier, and that I didn't plug the event before it ended! Next year, next year.

The holiday giving season is far from over, however! If you're still considering your charitable donations (good all year 'round, of course), you may want to check out Changing the Present, a nonprofit that directs your funds - however great or small - to the socially conscious cause of your choice. Some examples include funding opportunities and medical treatments for people in developing nations.

And let's not forget everyone's favorite, furry (or feathery) sustainable development nonprofit, Heifer Project. Rather than outright feeding recipients, Heifer gives livestock to be bred for wool, milk, eggs, and so on. Offspring are shared in the community, spreading the wealth. They do tree planting as well.

If you're like me and think the idea material gift for a loved one is a - you guessed it! - BOOK, check out these bloggish suggestions:

• Wizards Wireless discusses how to buy a book for a baby. Being at an age when babies seem to be cropping up in friends' families left and right, I'm grateful for the suggestions.
• MotherReader offers not one, not two, but THREE lists of ideas for pairing children's book with other items for an extra-special gift.

Some more tips for enjoying the holiday season:

• Musician Christine Kane's Functionally Challenged Family Holidays Official Self-Care Guide and Preparation Guide. It doesn't matter whether you're "functionally challenged" (though aren't we all?) to appreciate her wise advice. Via my friend C.
• 13 Tips for a Sustainable Holiday Season. In the flurry of holiday activity, take our Earth into consideration. Via my friend M.

Finally, take note: the Winter Solstice is but a week away. This means that in one week, the days will start getting longer again! I can't wait.